Discover Boats

These days looking for cheap but well proven alternative big fish protein baits is very important and homemade sausage meat baits and ground baits are brilliant baits for so many reasons. Luncheon meats and Pepperoni are popular and effective but extremely expensive as fishing baits. So let’s now see how to make your own big fish sausage meat baits and save yourself a fortune!

The first ideal part about sausage meat is how cheap and easily available it is. It comes in various forms and grades and as usual it is best to get the freshest product possible. This kind of meat is just not fashionable today which means right now is a perfect time to be exploiting it!

You can use the minced products or use a mincer to make a sticky pliable material to use to base you bait on. Pork meat is very nutritionally stimulating to big catfish and carp, supplying many essential nutritional needs including many amino acids and energy packed oils. Sausage meat may be made from pork alone or with other materials, but even adding very cheap wheat flour, or with a few eggs to meat with sausage rusk will bind bait to make practical bait dough for paste or boilies.

To make these economical protein based baits is fast and very easy!

For instance, start off with a small amount of meat to practice with like just half a pound of minced meat mixed with around 3 hens eggs in a bowl and with enough wheat flour added to mould into a pliable bait dough. You can use this as bait or put into sealed plastic freezer bags to store in the fridge or freezer for later use. Such bait is usually very instant on most carp and catfish waters, although different grades and brands of sausage meat will vary in success rates so do experiment!

Like the majority of carp and catfish baits, the best way to start fishing with it is to feed perhaps 2 to 6 pounds or more of it into your swim, in advance. (This is certainly not absolutely necessary however!) You might for instance, over a period of 3 days prior to fishing, start introducing paste pieces about an inch in diameter just by pulling them off your balls of dough you have made.

When you pre-bait fish will obviously get a smell and taste of it without getting hooked so be more confident when you do try it on the hook, so do it! You can use sausage meat baits as part of your ground baiting or with other meat baits like chopped spam, meatballs, luncheon meats if you want the extra expense; sausage meat and cheap rolled oats is fine! Scald or boil or steam your baits if needed where smaller fish prove a bother, but add some paste to your bait on your rig or on the hook to boost more soluble attraction…

As most commercial rolled baits have uniform shapes, your homemade baits in odd shapes have the advantage over more wary fish by disrupting their reference points! Boilies are just made by placing your dough baits only a handful at a time in half a pan of boiling water in a pan for a couple of minutes; this makes a resilient skin when they dry-off on conveniently placed absorbent towels or trays etc. keep your water boiling at all times by not adding too many baits at once and keep taking baits out after around 2 minutes or so.

Boiling baits for longer makes them harder as the eggs proteins coagulate more making your baits more resilient, but less attractive nutritionally. To make your baits more attractive the choices are many to improve results. Even adding garlic or sea salt or curry powders even at a teaspoon per egg will make a difference to performance.

You might just add a teaspoon of black pepper powder per egg used. Other examples of well proven kitchen favourites are yeast extract products like Marmite or Vegemite; add at a heaped tablespoon per egg, or even Parmesan or blue cheese powder which is ideal in sausage meat baits. You can simply add some Minamino or proprietary fishing liquid amino acids supplement like Nutramino to boost feeding stimulation and nutritional profile of your bait; or add fish meal, keratin, or poultry meal, or ground bird foods and lecithins for more digestible baits in winter, for example…

You can add almost anything to enhance the stimulatory effects of your sausage baits but it helps if you really know what your ingredients do inside your fish and how they work together in baits to contribute the overall effects and improve catch results, and this knowledge really does save you a fortune and boost your confidence hugely! There are many ingredients etc you might add to stimulate fish which may be very expensive over a season, but going to the supermarket, health food shop, Asian store etc can provide really potent gems for a fraction of the cost when you know what to look for in terms of bioactive substances especially… Even adding liquidised liver with a few drops of spice or herb oleoresins and liquid lecithins can make drastic differences to results for relatively little cost and your baits will always be unique of course which a big edge anyway!

The options are limited only by your imagination; but using proven fish feeding triggering substances and metabolically stimulating substances are among the best proven substances when you look at bait components… Homemade sausage meat baits (and ground baits) for big carp and catfish are well proven against any popular modern baits (even enzyme-active ones,) and I’ve proven this myself (although my baits are sometimes rather more complex than here.) So give them a try and you might decide to get much deeper into making your own homemade baits; but beware – they can become addictive!

By Tim Richardson.